HDR Exposure in Art of Illusion

Here's a render using the new HDR Exposure camera filter by "Jeremiah." I was amazed at how well the floor came out...without the filter installed, the floor was completely washed out and much of the orange was a bright yellow.

I am really, really, really glad for open source developers and plugin architectures at this point. :)

Also, I forgot I had put the Blue Screen of Death on the monitor in the scene...it was a funny surprise to render the image and see that.

Creating Jordan's Avatar: 1

I'm really not sure what I would do without some sort of vector graphics editor on hand all the time. I have one on my USB disk, on my laptop, on my desktop. This makes it very easy to do mockups, quick cartoons, sketches, typography...all sorts of stuff. This week I did a quick sketch of a friend in manga style. He asked me to make an avatar of him, and this is the less-serious avatar version. His hands are posed like that because he's a programmer and he's typing at a keyboard. And in the back is the Japanese for "AAAAaaaaaa."

In other news, I'm back from Australia with lots of cool memories. It's been a while since I traveled outside of the U.S., so I tried hard to think of mementos that would actually mean something to me when I got home. For example, the boomerangs we bought mean mostly nothing to me. On the other hand, I bought as many different candy bars as I could, and I found a stationery store and bought some stationery to remind me of Australia. By "stationery," I mean "a few pens and a pencil case with a kangaroo on it." This is the sort of stuff I will actually consume/use, so my souvenir purchasing had much more meaning behind it. :-)